Active Workspace: Big news for Teamcenter users

Siemens PLM just announced Active Workspace, a new product in the Teamcenter software portfolio.

There are three general groups of people who are going to be interested in Active Workspace: those who use Teamcenter, those who’ve thought about adopting Teamcenter, but haven’t made the jump yet, and those who are using competing PLM solutions, who will likely be telling their suppliers “we want something like this.”

Siemens PLM describes Active Workspace as “a personalized environment for accessing the entire PLM ecosystem, which provides all PLM users with the right information at the right time to make the right decisions. Active Workspace delivers high-performance search and visualization capabilities, simple yet powerful collaboration tools, and a groundbreaking user interface. Active Workspace delivers the multi-disciplinary decision support platform that PLM workers need to make smarter decisions and better products.”

So, Active Workspace connects users to the resources (people and information) they need to get their jobs done better.

Siemens PLM Software CEO Chuck Grindstaff puts it this way: “All companies and individuals face the challenge of dealing with information overload due to the increasing speed and volume of data coming from multiple sources. Active Workspace helps companies manage this challenge and significantly enhances decision making by reducing complexity and intelligently presenting PLM information that is accessible for all users… Active Workspace creates an intuitive and personalized 3D graphic interface that significantly enhances the ability of our PLM suite of offerings to deliver knowledge instantly to the right people, at the right place and in the right context to support rapid and intelligent decision making.”

Like I said, it connects users to the resources they need to get their jobs done better.

Joe Barkai, the Practice Director for Product Lifesyle Strategies at IDC, explains it a bit differently: “The constant increase in product complexity creates a need for a strong multi-disciplinary decision support platform that makes information exchange and collaboration simple, intuitive and effective. A dynamic decision support system, like Active Workspace, creates rich technical and business context to enable intelligent, high-fidelity decision making.”

Like I said, it connects users to the resources they need to get their jobs done better.

You might call Active Workspace a “dashboard.” It’s the place where a user will come to at the beginning of their work day. Here are Active Workspace’s major features:

Create visual reports without the need for training or support from IT.

Configure and Share Contexts

Save the recipe for decision contexts by utilizing our innovative new shelf.

Share information with another user or a whole group of users − whether it is a filtered list of search results, a color-coded visual report, or anything else – by dropping it on the shelf.

Once something is on the shelf, anybody else with access can reference the data, confident that the information is accurate and current.

Collaborate Effectively

Active Workspace will proactively suggest appropriate people for users to collaborate with based upon the context of the information they are reviewing, helping make sure they engage the right people to assist in making the right decision.

Collaboration tools are seamlessly integrated into Active Workspace, keeping users in a single tool and allowing them to get the answers they need faster.

Active Workspace integrates with e-mail and instant messaging, as well as Teamcenter Application Sharing, providing numerous ways to share information.

Search results from multiple sources are clearly displayed to the user in Active Workspace.

Why is Active Workspace a big deal?

What Active Workspace isn’t is a shiny front-end pasted on a PLM system, just to make it look sexier. It is a serious tool to help engineers to get their work done faster and better when dealing with information overload and organizational complexity. It’s just what a good tool should be: a force multiplier.

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Comments

Great article, Evan. The trend is clearly towards usability and improved user experience. Active Workspace is an interesting concept. Here is my take on what Siemens PLM does vs. other vendors — PLM, Data, Search and Future of User Experience. http://beyondplm.com/2012/04/03/plm-data-search-and-future-user-experience/.
Best, Oleg